How to remove the numbers in blogger post URL's

This article looks at the numbers that are in web-page addresses created by Blogger, what they mean and how you can influence them.

When you first publish a post, Blogger assigns a permanent web-address (aka an URL or a permalink) to the post.  I've previously explained how you can control the words used in this hyperlink.

A common question from people who are researching SEO for their blog is "how do I get rid of the numbers in the post-URL?".

Unfortunately the answer is not as straighforward as most people hope for.

Numbers near the start of Blogger URLS

As described in setting the content of your post's permalink, the URL given to posts published in Blogger shows the year and month of the original publication date for the post. I think this is because Blogger was originally set up as an on-line diary, with a lot of the features organised around the post-date.

Today, there are ways of giving your blog a home page, showing your posts in pages, and changing the order of the posts, which let your blog be a lot more than a date-ordered web-log.

Some blogging software (eg Wordpress) lets you choose the structure of the URLs which are used, eg leaving the date out totally, or puting it after the words.

However Blogger does not currently have any way to remove the date-part of the post URLs. And I could be wrong, but my best guess is that this will not change anytime soon.

So what options are available to remove the year and month numbers?

If you just don't want people to know the correct month and year of the post, then you can change the date before you publish the post for the the first time. Maybe make it something non-sensical (eg 1/1/1990). (However do remember that your RSS feed will show the actual date of publication, not the assigned date).

If you have some content where any month-and-year are particularly irrelevant, put it into a Page instead of a Post - because Page URLs don't contain a date.  But remember that you need to give users a way to get to these Pages, and that remember that they are not sent out in your RSS feed, so subscribers won't see the content.

The third - and least attractive - option: is to accept that this is how Blogger works and that you need to live with it or switch to another blogging tool.

Numbers near the end of Blogger URLS

Blogger puts digits at the end of post-URLs in order to make sure that each post ever published has a unique address.

Notice that I said "ever published": if you publish a post, then delete it, and then publish a second post with the same year, month and either title or customized-URL-words, then the second post's URL will have some digits put on the end, to stop it being the same as the first one.

Once a post is published, you cannot remove the digits and keep the same words and month/year.  The only way to avoid them is to make sure that your post-URLs are unique. So if you publish a post and notice that it has digits on the end of the URL, one option is to delete that post, and replace it with one which has a different publication date or customized-URL-words(don't forget to copy the post contents before you delete it!)   Or you could just set it back to draft status, and then publish it again with different and this time unique customized-URL-words.

For example, if you publish and find that you get

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-07/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes01.html

you may want to delete the post, and republish the content in a post with a different date like

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-06/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes.html

Does it really matter?

Personally I'm not convinced that having numbers in Blogger URL's is a problem.

If the content is so weak, and poorly linked to by other sites and social media that the presence of numbers in the URL is affecting visitor numbers, then it seems to me that there are more important things for you to be worrying about.

On the other hand, if your blog is already popular and well-optimized, and you're looking to get the last possible bit of SEO benefit - you'd be better off using your time to write even more good quanlity, unique, content so that your exisiting subscribers visit more often, instead of fussing over something that you cannot control.

Or am I mistaken?

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Related Articles

Setting the custom-URL for a blog post

Giving your blog a home page

Putting Blogger posts into pages

How to set the date for a post

The difference between Posts and Pages

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Removing a post from your blog

Copy the contents between blog posts - and keep all the formatting.

How to set the URL for Blogger posts

This article shows how to use the Permalink options to control the URL used for a post in your blog.

URLs and Blog Posts

When you first publish a post in blogger, an URL (called a permalink in blogger) is automatically generated for that post. It looks like:

www.yourDomain/yyyy/mm/WORDS-ABOUT-MY-POST

In this URL:

• yourDomain is either your custom domain (eg fred-fish.com) or your blogspot domain if you aren't using a custom domain at the time (eg www.areyoublogger.blogspot.com)
• yyyy/mm is the year and month of the post's original publication date.

Years ago, Blogger chose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-MY based on the title, or the first words in the post if the title was blank. They used some rules eg leaving out "the" and other common words, and putting numbers on the end so that every post has a unique URL (called a "permalink" in Blogger).

However Blogger have now provided a tool that lets you choose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST separately from the post-title.

How to change the customisable part of the URL for a post

1  Edit the post in the usual way.

2  In the Post Settings area (currently at the right hand side of the editor), there is a section called Permalink.

3   Click on Links to show the options in it.

4   Click the custom URL radio button

5   Type the words that you want to use in WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST into the Custom URL box

6   Click Done.

7   Finish the post, and Publish it.

Restrictions

The only characters you can use are:

• lowercase letters (ie a, b, c ... z)
• uppercase letters (ie A, B, C ... Z)
• digits (ie 0, 1, 2 ... 9)
• underscore (ie _)
• dash (ie - )
• full-stop, also known as a period (ie .)

It looks like there is no restriction on the number of characters you can put into the URL.  For example, I was just able to make a post in my test blog, with this URL:  
http://bhat-draftarticlestore.blogspot.ie/2012/07/123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-.html
(you cannot see the post, because that particular blog isn't open for public reading.)


If the combinaton of yyyy-mm from post-date (which you can change - see Setting the Post Date) and WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-BLOG is not unique, Blogger will leave out the last character(s), and put in numbers to make it unique.

It only applies to Posts, not Pages:  the only way to influence the URL / permalink for a Page on your blog is to choose the initial words in the page-title very carefully.   (Ref:  the difference between Posts and Pages)

Why should you bother? What words should you use?

Firstly, it's only worth changing the custom words in your post-URL  if SEO matters for your blog.

If you think the change is worth it, then you need to think about what specific words
1) accurately reflect the content of your blog, and
2) are likely to be the words that people search for.

Unless you're a spammer, there is no point in making your post url www.myBlog/2012-07/hot-and-sexy-topic if your post doesn't have any content about hot-and-sexy-topic. (And if you are a spammer, you may as well leave Blogger now, before you get kicked off anyway.)

Leave out smaller filler words like "the" "a" "and" - unless they are relevant to the post-contents. For example include "the Who" if your post is about the band called The Who, but leave it out if your post is about the cats who can fly.

Lastly, many SEO experts (self-proclaimed and otherwise) say that dashes are better than dots or underscores. Only Google and Bing know if they'are correct or not. But it's probably a good idea to use xxx-yy-aaaa instead of xxx_yy_aaaa or xxx.yy.aaaa, just in case they are.

Changing the post-title after publication

Google's help-article about the custom-permalink feature says:

"because Blogger automatically creates the URL from information from your post title, your URL would change should you decide to edit the title. This would result in broken links, and fewer visitors to your blog"

This isn't the way Blogger worked before: until now, I often published a post with one title using the words I wanted in the URL, and then very quickly edit it and change the title to the words I wanted in the title. For example, for a recent post

• the URL is  http://areyoublogger.blogspot.com/2012/07/html-code-for-popular-gadgets-in.html
• the post-title is now:  Where to get the HTML code for popular gadgets in Blogger

I just tried this again in my test-blog, and found that it's still true: even if you change the title, the post URL doesn't change.

Changing the custom-URL words after publication

Originally, after you hit the Publish button for the first time, there was no way change the permalink:  if you click on the Permalink option in Post Settings, you are shown the custom value that you chose, but you cannot change it.

However you can now:

• Edit the post.
• Click the Revert to draft button.
• Edit the post URL in the same way

and the URL of your post will be changed.  Note that if you do this, the post characteristics (view count, comments) are kept.   This means that Blogger must be associating them with the unchanged internal post-identifier, not the URL.

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Related Articles

How to change the date for a post

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Use a private blog to get your posts right before publish them

Linking your blog and the social networks

Moving material from one blog post to another

Deciduous blog posts leave evergreens for dead

In a social-media world, deciduous blog posts have an enormous advantage of both ever-green and ephemeral content - find out what they are, and how to use them to best advantage.

Introducing deciduous blog posts

In botany and horticulture, deciduous plants

... are those that lose all of their leaves for part of the year. (Wikipedia)

In blogging, deciduous posts are ones that your readers lose all interest in at certain times - eg posts about Christmas carols during January, or winter gardening tips during spring.

Which sounds bad.

Until you realise that deciduous posts are also ones that your readers (both current and new ones) gain renewed interest in at certain times. That means it's quite reasonable for you - and everyone else  - to mention them on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ each time that the new "season" starts.   If your posts are good, you might even get more new visits from social media in the subsequent seasons than in the first time around.

When you think about it, it's easy to see that in a social-media world ...

Deciduous blog posts leave evergreens for dead.

What does this mean for bloggers

If getting more visitors through either search or referrals is important for your blog, then you should :

• Be systematic about  how you remember to promote seasonal posts you've already published.   

• Find ways to write posts that will be become popular on a cyclical basis.

• Make strategic decisions about whether to change an existing post vs when to make a new post about a seasonal topic.

• Set up Labels or custom-redirects to send people who end up on a previous-year post to the most recent one.

Remember to promote your seasonal posts

Make a calendar of significant factors that should cause extra traffic for your blog, and send yourself a reminder message in time to review and re-share the relevant posts, according to your blog's social media strategy.

Working out exactly when do these promotions can be tricky. Ideally this is based on studying your visitor statistics (Analytics or whatever tool you use) to see when the posts got popular last time around.

You might think that you know anyway, because the seasons are obvious, but it's easy to miss earlier-than-expected surges in interest. For example, posts about Christmas music might actually be popular with music directors who're choosing their Christmas programs in September. But you do need to be careful about and where how you promote posts like this - because no one else wants to be reminded about Christmas so soon!

Finding seasonal posting reasons in non-seasonal blogs

Some blogs clearly have cyclic patterns: gardens follow the natural world, folk songs follow holidays (eg workers-rights songs for labor day, patriotic songs for national days), gift suggestions follow established human seasons (Christmas, Valentines), homeschoolers generally follow the school year.

But if you look harder, you can find seasonal patterns that apply to lots of other blogs, too. For example, one well-known blogger-helper often does a post towards the end of the American college year reminding people to transfer ownership of their blogs to a non-college Google account.

Ways to do this include:

• Blogging about the similarities (or differences) between your niche and some unrelated by widely-known seasonal event  (eg "Writing poetry is not like Christmas because ...".
• Writing about famous people in your topic who have died - close to their anniversary or birthday.   
• Making up your own seasonal patter  eg   "In March, Crotchet-Blogger celebrates cable-stitch". 

Promotion existing posts vs publishing new ones

A big question for bloggers with deciduous blog topics is whether they should publish a new post each season, or just polish and promote the existing post(s).

The answer depends on the nature of the information each season:

Situation	What do do
Are there changes to the information each season?	Make a new post, link to it from the last season's posts, promote it like you do any other post.
Does exactly the same information apply each year	Review the existing post, and then promote it on social media - and perhaps in the blog itself or in other new posts.

For example, one of my blogs is about public transport news in my city.  This has clear seasonal patterns around public holidays, the tourist season, a major sporting event, and the academic year.   The sporting event causes the biggest peak, with web-traffic up by 600%, week-on-week.  Each year's  information for it is very similar: buses leave at (roughly the same time) from (exactly the same place) for (close to the same fare) as last year. But each year there are changes: slightly different times, different effects on other bus services, one year there was a park-and-ride. So for this blog, I do a new post each year.   And I go back into last year's post and add a line like

"This information is for 2013.   Click here for this year's bus services."

and I make the "here" link to a label search for the topic, so that the most recent post will always come up first in the list.

By comparison, in another blog, I've published a printable sheet of non-religious Christmas carol words for which copyright has expired.  Over time, it will be possible to add extra carols to this.  But this won't happen each year - and all the existing content will continue to be relevant forever. So I don't republish this in a new post each year.   Instead, I promote it with a gadget on the sidebar, and I share the post on my social media accounts for the blog.

Be aware that if you do decided to make a slight change to an existing seasonal post, rather than write a new one:

• RSS subscribers probably won't see the enhanced post in their feed.
• Follow-by-email subscribers will see it.

Other things to think about

When you thinking about how you can get the more traffic using the deciduous posts in your blog, there are a few other factors to keep in mind:

Look for multi-year cycles

Some events happen once every 2, 3 or more years. For example:

• Some sports events (the Olympics, the Volvo Ocean race, the Commonwealth games) happen every-so-many years. 
•  Leap years happen once every four years.
• In some countries, elections happen every five years.

These multi-year patterns can be even more powerful than the every-year ones, because less people are aware of them, and readers in general are not-so-likely to remember what you wrote four years ago.

Don't forget the Southern Hemisphere

Spring starts in September, not February, if you live in the bottom half of the world. And cars need to be prepared for winter in April, not November.

This may mean that you can re-promote posts based on natural seasons twice a year - or that you should target some seasonal posts by hemisphere.

Some readers have different holidays

It's easy to think that all your readers are just like you, and live with the same seasonal patterns that you do.   But that's not always true:

• People who don't live in America might not even know when Thanksgiving or Black Friday is, much less what it means.

• In many Western countries, Christmas is a holiday even for people who aren't religious. But there are countries where Christmas isn't a holiday at all and most people don't even know it exists.

How have you used seasonal / deciduous topics to get new interest in your blog?

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Related Articles:

Mapping out your blog's social media strategy: how your blog works with your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc accounts

5 reasons why SEO doesn't matter for your blog

Using labels to categorise blog posts

Transferring a blog to a new owner

Follow-by-email, an easy way to offer email subscription to your blog

Help visitors who arrive at your blog via a link to a deleted post

If you sometimes delete posts from your blog, then it's a good idea to provide some help to people who who arrive at your blog via links to those posts.

(Even if you don't have any links to those posts, it's likely that a search-engine somewhere will have some - and other people may have bookmarked or shared them, too.)

There are two options for doing this:

Post-specific redirects

Use these if you want to re-direct visitors who come to a particular previous post:

Go into Settings > Search Preferences, click Edit beside Custom Redirects.

Click New Redirect, to create instructions for what to do if a visitor tries to navigate to a specific post.

Put the address of the post that you want to make a re-direct for into the From field.

Put the address of the post that you want to visitors to be taken to into the To field.

For both addresses, the part you need to enter is the URL of the post from the first backslash on.  

Do not put in your blog-address

Do include the date-part of the URL and the backslash.
eg
for    http://areyoublogger.blogspot.com/2013/01/changing-a-label-value-for-all-posts.html
use   /2013/01/changing-a-label-value-for-all-posts.html

Tick the Permanent check-box.

Click Save.

Click Save Changes.   (Yes, you need to do both Saves)

A generic page-not-found message

Use this if you do not want to set up post-specific re-directs, or if you cannot remember the URL of your deleted posts.

Go into Settings > Search Preferences, and edit the Custom Page Not Found option.

Put in some text welcoming the visitor, explaining that the page they were looking for is no longer available, and suggesting other places that they could try.

 This text can include links to other posts, so long as you hand-code them. (You might like to get code for this using the post editor).

Dealing with the "Keyword not provided" problem in your statistics

This article explains why the proportion of "keyword not provided" visits to most websites is increasing, and gives you options for finding out what keywords people are searching for when they reach your blog.

Why the percentage of not-provided search visits to your blog has increased

If SEO is important for your blog, and if you therefore watch the Stats > Traffic Sources tab in your Blogger dashboard or your Google Analytics results, you'll probably have seen that proportion of your search-visitors whose keyword is "not provided" has gone up a lot recently, to be more-or-less 100% of your Google search traffic.   (In the Blogger Stats tab "not provided" isn't shown - but the number of visits per keyword is now massively less than the vists from Google.)

This is no accident: Google is now witholding the keywords that people use, and (says that) this to protect your visitor's privacy. The issue has been widely discussed in sites like SearchEngineLand.

Opinions vary, but many people believe that

"Not knowing keywords has big implications if you use data about what people search for to decide how to develop your blog." [tweet this quote].

For example,   I publish listings of the contents of old (ie graphical copyright expired) song-books in a particular niche on one of my blogs.  There are far too many songs for me to load the full text or sheet music of all of them. And this is a niche with lots of competition:   there are a zillion websites distributing song-lyrics (most illegally).  But by watching the search-terms that led people to arrive at certain pages, I can identify particular songs that people were looking for and not finding anywhere else (the so called "long tail" of search keywords). If these songs are now in the public domain, I can make a dedicated page for them, and share what I know - in many cases after doing more research and pulling together information from a range of different sources.    Not knowing the keywords that people use to get to the book-listing pages would totally destroy this approach.

What you can do about it

So far I've identified three alternative options for getting data about what my visitors are searching for.

Ask for user-provided information

I've used Google Docs to make a data-collection form, and invited my visitors to use it to tell me about songs they are looking for.

The advantage is that I can ask them for richer information than just the keywords, eg where / when they remembmer it from, multiple snatches of the lyrics, what style the music is, etc.

But the disadvantage - and it's a big one - is that it only works for people who actually get to my site and then go into the other page where this form is kept, and fill in the form. I don't want to go into details - but let's just say that I haven't been run off my feet!

Get data from WebMaster Central

If you have verified your blog in Google Webmaster Tools, then the Search traffic > Search Queries tab shows the queries that have caused your blog to show up in search results pages, as well as how many times this has happened and what position, on average, you had in these pages.

This is richer information than you get from Analytics or Blogger-Stats, which only tell you about people who actually visited your blog.

But the disadvantages are that data is only kept for 90 days, and it only shows the top 2000 keywords.   Both of these are issues for me - some of my song-book contents are seasonal - if something is being looked for now, then the moment (week, month) may have passed by the time that I've noticed the trend, researched the song and written it up to a standard that I'm happy to publish. So really I want to checking the logs for nine months ago, so I can research things that are likely to be popular again next year.

Get data from AdWords

Advertising campaigns are the one place where Google is passing the search-keywords through to back-end systems. And because of this, Adwords does have data about what your visitors are searching for - provided you've set it up to collect this data. To get it up:

Firstly, sign up for an AdWords account. You probably have to deposit $10 into the account to get started - but you don't actually need to set up any advertising campaigns or spend any money after that.

Then link your AdWords account to your Google Webmaster Central account.

Once this is done, Adwords will start collecting the search-keywords for your blog. To get at the data:

• Log in to AdWords
• Select "All Online Campaigns,"
• Make an empty campaign (if you haven't got one already)
• Go to the "Dimensions" tab
• Change "View" to "Paid & organic".

AdWords will display your stats, since you signed up and linked your account. This includes the top search terms that users got to your site with, number of clicks, number of queries and some other measures too.

I'm only just starting to assess how well this will for for my song-listing site - will update this post when I have more specific information about how well it works and whether I can get actionable results from it.

What other alternatives have you found?

Leave a comment below, and I'll expand this list as we find out more options for accessing keyword-based search traffic information.

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Related Articles:

Using Google Docs to put a survey questionnaire into Blogger

Six reasons why SEO doesn't matter for your blog

How to set up Twitter's "view summary" cards to work with Blogger posts

This article shows how to install Twitter Cards into Blogger - and explains why you might do this if Twitter could be an important source of visitors for your blog.

What are Twitter Cards

Recently, Neil Patel explained why having social sharing tags installed into your blog can be important, and I've written a little more about it specifically for Facebook and Blogger here.

Twitter, for reasons best known to themselves, have developed their own version of social media meta-tags, called "Twitter Cards".    (Apparently they do make some use of Open Graph tags - but not for Twitter cards displays.)


Two things happen inside Twitter when someone tweets a message including a link to a website or blog that has Twitter-cards installed.  

Firstly, the message has the words "View Summary" under it, instead of just "Expand".

Secondly, when someone in Twitter clicks the View Summary link, more information (ie a "Twitter Card") is shown about the contents of the link - like this:

In his post, Neil Patel also stated that if you don't use Wordpress,

"you’ll need to manually generate meta tags for each page on your site"

but fortunately for Blogger users who are brave enough to edit their template that's not quite true.

How to install Twitter Cards into a blog made with Blogger

There are two simple steps needed to set up Twitter sharing tags for your blog:

• Adding the code to your template, and then 
• Asking Twitter if you've got it right.    

The 2nd step is necessary because (for whatever reason) Twitter won't use the tags you have installed until you've tested them in Twitter's own validation tool.

Step 1   Add the Twitter Card meta-tags to your template

Edit your template in the usual way.


Find the   </head   statement, and just before it add the following lines of code:

<!--  START - TWITTER CARD TAGS   -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"/> 
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@YOUR-TWITTER-ACCOUNT-NAME"/> <meta name="twitter:domain" content="YOUR-BLOG-URL"/>

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'><meta name="twitter:title" expr:content='data:blog.pageName'/><b:else/>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.homepageUrl' name='twitter:url'/>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageTitle' name='twitter:title'/></b:if>

<b:if cond='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl'><meta name="twitter:image:src" expr:content='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl'/><b:else/><meta name="twitter:image:src" content='URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-IF-THERE-IS-NOT-A-THUMBNAIL-PHOTO-IN-THE-POST' /></b:if> 
<b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription'><meta name="twitter:description" expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription'/><b:else/><!-- Still looking for a way to use the post snippet if there's no description --></b:if>

<meta name='twitter:url' expr:content='data:blog.canonicalUrl'/>
<!--  END - TWITTER CARD TAGS   -->

Except, you need to replace a few items with your own values:

• YOUR-BLOG-URL - with your blog's address (eg for me, it's areyoublogger.blogspot.com)

• YOUR-TWITTER-ACCOUNT-NAME - with the Twitter account name for your blog. (This line is optional)

• URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-IF-THERE-IS-NOT-A-THUMBNAIL-PHOTO-IN-THE-POST - with the web-address of an alternative picture to use if the post doesn't have a thumbnail image.

Save the template changes.


(Twitter also have a code-generator - but it's for websites in general, while I have configured the code above to use some of the values that Blogger makes available to us.)

Step 2   Validate your domain

After you have done the first step, go  https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator.  This is Twitter's validating tool, where they check if your code meets their requirements.

Log in using your Twitter account.  
You do need to have a Twitter account yourself - or at least one that is dedicated to the blog - to use the validator and thus to install Twitter Cards.


Click the Validate and Apply tab.


Enter the address of a post from your blog and press Go.


If you're using a browser that supports showing Twitter Cards, then a preview of the card for your post will be shown in the right side of the screen.   Check that this looks correct.


Look at the list of results of your Twitter-card values shown on the left of the screen.   If any of them show a red-dot, then there is a problem that you need to fix.   Typically this will be because you've accidentally left out a quote mark when you were adding your custom values.

Fix any problems, and enter the blog-post URL again - keep going until you get a green dot at the top of the list.    (Some of the twitter card values are option, so it doesn't matter if they show as grey because they're irrelevant for a Blogger site.)


Enter the URL of your blog overall  (ie not a specific post).

• If you do nothave a custom domain (ie your blog is  myBlog.blogspot.com), then make sure you enter the blogspot.com URL, not the country-specific one (eg   myBlog.blogspot.in).   This is important later in the validation process.

• Fix any problems for this as well.   (There shouldn't be any, but I think it's worth double-checking, especially if you modify the twitter-cards code in any way.)

Press the Request Approval button at the top of the left hand sidebar.


Confirm the administrative details on the screen that opens - by default it will be filled in with details from your Twitter account.   You may be asked for:

• Contact information for the person responsible for administering cards on your website (name, email address, Twitter handle)
• Website information:   the URL (ie the domain), and a description.   Note:  if you are based outside the USA and don't have a custom domain, then most probably your country-specific address will be shown here.    Change it to the blogspot.com   address.
• Whether your site publishes images or videos that may contain sensitive content (eg nudity, violence, or medical procedures) - so that Twitter can warn viewers before showing them.
• The website's Twitter-name.

Press Submit Request.

After a moment, if your details are correct, Twitter shows a message saying 

"Thanks for applying to be part of Twitter's cards service. We'll review your request as soon as possible. Expect a few weeks for turn-around time. You will receive an email when your request has been reviewed."

I'm not sure if they apply this to all (or indeed any) countries or Twitter accounts:   when I installed Twitter Cards for this site, I got an email in a few minutes saying .

Your Twitter card is ready!
We've activated the summary card for areyoublogger.blogspot.com.
If you want to use other kinds of Twitter cards (and we know you do), please make another request.

And the cards themselves were activated on a test-tweet that I did a few minutes after that.

What your readers see

If you have installed the Twitter Cards correctly, your current readers should see nothing different when they visit your blog or when they read your posts via email or and RSS feeder.

But when they include a reference to your blog in something that they send out inside Twitter, the content that they (and their followers) see is a nicely formatted card rather than an ugly-url.

Troubleshooting

Search Descriptions

Twitter cards will only work properly if you have enabled Search Descriptions for your blog, and if you have entered one for every post that is tweeted.    I looked for ways around this using the post-snippet, but haven't found a way to make this work yet.

Country-specific redirects

Neil Patel suggested one tag that is not included in the standard Twitter Cards documentation: twitter:url

Using it gets around the problems associated with country-specifc URLs for blogspot domain blogs, by changing any Tweets of them to the blogspot.com page, instead of having your tweets split across multiple urls.

I've included it in my list of tags, customized to take its value from Blogger.    However I'm not yet 100% sure if it will work - and will update this article accordingly.

Pictures

I've set up the image tag to use the thumbnail picture for each post - because that is the only one that you can access on a systematic way for each post.

Twitter's rules say that pictures must be less than 1mb in file size, at least 60px by 60px, and that ones larger than 120px by 120px will be resized.    However Blogger may have a thumbnail photo for some of your posts that is less than 60-by-60.   For these it is likely that your default image will be used instead.

The only way to over-ride this is to use a post-specific Twitter meta-tag which points to a larger photo like:

<b:if cond='data:blog.postURL == &quot;URL-OF-THE-POST&quot;'><meta name="twitter:image:src" content='URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-FOR-THIS-POST' />
</b:if>

Domains

Twiter's documentation was initially a little sketchy about which specific domain should be validated. Some people reported having to validate all three possible URLs, ie

www.your-blog.blogspot.com
your-blog.blogspot.com
/*your-blog.blogspot.com

although it is possible that this has now been resolved.

What other problems have you encountered with Twitter Cards?

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Related Articles:

Adding Facebook's Open Graph tags to your blog

How to edit your template

Post.thumbnail: a summary image for each Blogger post

Linking your blog to the social networks

Get your blog-posts into Google's in-depth search results

This QuickTip is about the new in-depth search results feature that Google has recently introduced, and how you set up your blog-posts so they have a chance of being considered as in-depth.

In-depth search results

Google recently announced a new category that may sometimes be shown in a search results page, ie the page of information that is shown to a person after they have run a search in Google.

These suggested "in-depth" results are meant to help people to "find relevant in-depth articles in the main Google Search results"

This feature will be initially only be used on search results from on google.com in English, but is likely to extend to other google searches (eg google.co.uk, google.in, etc) and other languages over time.

Google's stated aim is for the in-depth panel to appear when someone searches for "person or organization name, or other broad topic", and for it to include

"thoughtful in-depth content that will remain relevant for months or even years after publication. ... [including material from] well-known publishers ... [and] lesser-known publications and blogs"

They haven't told us what counts as "in-depth" - but my initial guess is posts / articles that are at least several thousand words long, and possibly which have "enough" headers to show that they cover a range of sub-topics and points-of-view.  

An in-depth panel in Google's search-engine-results-page (SERP) looks like this:

At the moment, it is positioned at the bottom of the first search results page, as shown below.

Getting blog-posts included in in-depth result lists

Some bloggers write in-depth content about individual people, organizations, or other broad topics, and so may be interested in setting up their posts so they can be considered to be included in the in-depth results.

Google's guidelines about how to do this for websites in general are here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3280182

There are no promises and no magic-bullet solutions here:  competing against blogs and websites published by large organizations with editorial staff and SEO experts isn't easy.   But I think that it will be possible, particularly if you're an expert in your field, and have content that is unique in a particular niche.

Looking at Google's article, particularly relevant points for bloggers are:

• Using Schema.org markup
  Recommended properties are headline, alternativeHeadline, image, description, datePublished and articleBody - some of these are from the general schema.org set, not specifically for articles.

• Authorship markup

• Logo

I also suspect that having a good thumbnail picture for your blog may also be important - especially if you don't have authorship set up.

Pagination and canonicalization is probably not so relevant, as most blogging tools don't provide automatic facilities for multi-part posts. However if you do want to combine several blog-posts into one "in-depth" candidate, note their comment about needing "a rel=canonical pointing at either each individual page, or a "view-all" page" and not just to the first post in the series.

How to implement schema.org properties in Blogger

I've described schema.org before - but I have to admit that I haven't implemented it yet in any of my blogs.   (Though I do have plans to use some, and have done Facebook's Open Graph tags.)

Blogger doesn't currently have tools in its screens that let you to set these features yourself - so to implement them at the moment, you will need to edit your template, and most probably add statements like:

If CURRENT-URL = A SPECIFIC BLOG POST
THEN SCHEMA.ORG COMMANDS

This isn't the correct syntax: I'm assuming that anyone who can figure out the schema.org codes won't need help with the HTML syntax.   And I'm not sure whether the code should go into the header or body sections.  But it gives you the general idea.   And my excuse is that this is a quick-tip, not a fully researched article at this stage.

Hopefully Google will put some features to make this easier into Blogger soon, for the sake of bloggers for whom SEO is important, but who aren't so brave about editing their template.

---

Related Articles:

Why SEO matters for some bloggers

Advantages and disadvantages of editing your Blogger template

Introducing schema.org

Implementing Facebook's Open Graph tags

Post-thumbnail:   a picture to represent a blog-post

Webmaster tools Structured Data Testing Tool - helping bloggers who care about SEO

This quick-tip introduces the Google Webmaster Tools structured data testing tool, which gives you a view of how your site looks to the search-engines.

Today I discovered that Google Webmaster Tools offers tools for testing the structured data on your website.

I haven't seen any announcements about it, just noticed it there when I was looking for something else - so I'm not sure if it's really new, just new-to-me, or I've been lucky enough to get a it before most people do.

You can find it here (or at least that's where I'm finding it):    http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Once you're at that page, you can paste in either an URL (your own, or someone else) or some HTML, press preview - and the system will show you how the meta-tags, open-graph tags and other Google-supported structured data on your site looks to Google.   This isn't important for many bloggers - but is very useful information if SEO matters for your blog.

And you can also "Select the HTML tab to view the retrieved HTML and experiment with adjusting it." - and so test out the effect of making changes to your template etc.

The results show you:

• A preview of how the URL looks in a Google search-engine-results-page.
• Authorship testing results - whether have a Google+ page or profile associated with the site
• Authorship email verifications results
• Publisher markup verification status
• An extract of the structured data

I don't even begin to understand what all the results mean.    And I'm not sure if we can do something about all results that are shown - eg   checking Are-You-Blogger currently tells me that there are values for properties that I've never set (eg blogid and postid)  and also properties that aren't part of the schema, eg:

• Error: Page contains property "image_url" which is not part of the schema.
• Error: Page contains property "blogid" which is not part of the schema.
• Error: Page contains property "postid" which is not part of the schema.

But, much like the syntax-checker provided by Facebook for checking how successful you were at  installing Open Graph tags I'm sure that this will be a useful SEO diagnostic tool.

How to make AdSense ads in your site load faster

This article is about a new, faster, type of AdSense code which is available, and how you can add it to your blog.

AdSense have announced that they are now providing a new, faster, type of code for their ads.

This code is "asynchronous", which means that other content on the page will still keep on loading, even if the advertisement is delayed.

This a good thing, because it lets your blog's visitors see your posts more quickly.  Also, if SEO matters for your blog, then having it load as quickly as possible is important, because Google likes pages that load quickly.

How to put asynchronous Adsense ads into your blog

Blogger have not commented, but I am 99.99999% certain that the new asynchronous ad-code has not be implemented into the AdSense gadgets that are available from Blogger's Add-a-gadget tool.

So to put it into your blog, you need to:

• Follow the standard instructions for getting AdSense code for a website.

• When you reach the Ad code box, choose 'Asynchronous (BETA)' from the Code type drop-down menu

• Install the code into your blog in the same was that you install any other 3rd party HTLM .

You may also want to use techniques like centering gadgets on your blog - but remember that the changes which you are allowed to make to AdSense code are very limtied.

Troubleshooting

AdSense are still describing this new code as "beta" - this means they're pretty sure it's ok, but it might still have some glitches.   So if you do use it, check out your blog in a variety of browsers (ie Chrome and Firefox) to make sure that it's working, and keep an eye on your AdSense earnings too - if they drop unexpectedly, you might want to switch back, and check if that was the problem.

They recommend that if you are going to use the asynchronous code, you should change all the ad-units on your site at once. This could take a while if you've installed ads inside your blog psots but may be worth the effort.  That said, personally I'm going to wait until the new code isn't described as "beta" anymore before I put into the posts in one of my blogs.

Does it work?

Just before I published this post, I replaced the AdSense ads on this blog with the new versions of the code.  Do you think that it makes Are-You-Blogger load quicker?

Has it made your own blog load more quickly?

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Related articles:

How to put AdSense ads inside Blogger posts

How to add a gadget to your blog

Installing 3rd party HTML into Blogger

Does search-engine traffic matter for your blog? 5 reasons why not

Tools for measuring how quickly your blogger pages load

How to centre-align gadgets in Blogger

Allowable changes to AdSense ad code

AdWords external keywords research tool is going to be retired

This quick article shares an observation about the likelihood that Google's free Keywords Research Tool is being turned off.

Most SEO advice says that if SEO is important for your blog, then you should use a keyword research tool to find out the words and phrases that people are actually searching for, and then use these words (so-called "keywords") a lot, because they are most likely to get more visitors for your blog.

There are many tools that can be used to look for keywords, but Google's own keywords research tool is often recommended:  it's free, and no one knows more about key-words than Google does.

The tool is provided as part of the AdWords product (ref AdSense vs AdWords what's the difference).

Usually, you need to sign in to an AdWords account to use their tools.   An AdWords account may be based on your usual Google account, but because it can be used to buy advertising, Google ask you to put a small amount of money into it, so you can use it to pay for advertising campaigns immediately.    (They don't charge you immediately, they just want your account to have a positive balance, so it's able to be used.)

However their Search-based Keywords tool (announced back in 2009) and it's upgraded version, the Keywords-tool ( http://www.adwords.google.com/keywordtool or https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - both which currently re-direct to https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS ) have been available without logging in, provided you complete a simple captcha-text .

Today, though, I've noticed this announcement at the top of the page:

In the coming months, the external Keyword Tool will no longer be available. To get keyword ideas, sign in to your AdWords account and try Keyword Planner.

I cannot see any announcements about this in the AdWords blog.   But this actually has very little information about the keywords tool anyway, most of what is there dates from 2008/09, and they haven't used "keyword" as a label for their posts.  

Google aren't in the habit of putting up notices like that which are wrong, so my guess is that, sooner or later, this tool is going to be removed, and their only keywords-research option will be the Keyword Planner, which isn't free .

So maybe it's time to start finding a new favourite free keyword research tool.   Some reviews to get started with:

• Search Engine Land:  Three Free Keyword Research Tools
• 22 Free Keyword Research Tools

Or maybe bloggers should just forget about keyword research, and focus SEO-basics, and then on writing good quality, natural-language, unique content.

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Related Articles

AdSense vs AdWords what's the difference

 Five reasons why SEO is irrelevant for your blog

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Why enabling a mobile template just became more important to some bloggers

This QuickTip explains some recent announcements from Google  about SEO and mobile devices, and what they mean for Blogger users.

If SEO matters for your blog, and your blog is relevant for users with moble devices, then you pretty much need to enable a mobile template.

Why?   In short, because this recent post from Webmaster Central says that for Google the ranking of search results on mobile devices is now impacted by how well sites are optimized for mobile devices.

This means that if you haven't set up your blog for mobile, then it won't come up so highly in the search results seen by mobile users.

As well as the template, there are a range of other factors that affect how well your site works for mobile. Blogger users cannot control a lot of them, though we can think about:

• Page load speed 
• Using the Pages gadget as the top menu bar, rather than a linked-list or labels gadget, - because it converts into a drop-down menu in when a mobile template is applied.

Also, remember that if you make a home-page using a custom re-direct, this will only work in your desktop version. The re-direct isn't applied for mobile viewers, they just see your most recent posts in mobile-friendly tiles.

How to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into Blogger

This article shows how to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into Blogger

Why Open Graph 

Neil Patel recently explained on Quick Sprout why having Facebook and Twitter tags installed into your blog is important.

To cut his long story short, if you install them, then when someone shares your blog-post, the shared item looks better. This means that more people are likely to follow the link and/or share it themselves - so your blog gets more traffic, and people think you're more professional and thus credible.

Neil also stated that if you don't use Wordpress, "you’ll need to manually generate meta tags for each page on your site" - but fortunately for Blogger users who are brave enough to edit their template that's not true.   Blogger provides lots of SEO-supportive features these days, and you can easily use them to make OG-tags work on your blog - even if you haven't quite got your head around what OG is - personally it took me months to understand what it was all about.

The following sections have more details about how to do this.

How to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into a blog made with Blogger

Edit your template in the usual way.

1     Tell Google about the namespace:

Find the opening <html  ... statement, and add the Open Graph namespace information to it.   The code to add is

xmlns:og='http://ogp.me/ns#'

and it goes after the existing namespace statements.   For example, my current tag looks like:

<html b:version='2' class='v2' expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection'
xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'
xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b'
xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data'
xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'    >

or like this after the line is added:

<html b:version='2' class='v2' expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection'
xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'
xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b'
xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data'
xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'
xmlns:og='http://ogp.me/ns#'>

2   Add the Open Graph tags

Find the closing </head> tag.
(Hint:  I often search for just </head   ie without the closing >, in case there's something else in the tag in my template)


Put the following code immediately before it:

<!-- Begin Open Graph metadata --> 

<meta expr:content='&quot;en_US&quot;' property='og:locale'/> <meta expr:content='data:blog.canonicalUrl' property='og:url'/> 

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName' property='og:title'/>
<meta content='article' property='og:type'/>

</b:if> 

<meta expr:content='data:blog.title' property='og:site_name'/> 

<b:if cond='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl'>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl' property='og:image'/>
<b:else/>
<meta content='URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-IF-THERE-IS-NOT-A-THUMBNAIL-PHOTO-IN-THE-POST' property='og:image'/>
</b:if> 

<b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription'>

<meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' property='og:description'/>

<b:else/>

<!-- Still looking for a way to use the post snippet if there's no description -->

</b:if>

<!-- End Open Graph metadata -->

This code needs to be adapted for your blog.   In particular:

• en_US

This value is fine if your blog is written in US-English. But if you are writing in UK-English, you may want to change it to en_GB.   

And if you are using a different language altogether, you should change it to the two letter code for that language-territory combination:   see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internationalization/  for more information about the codes that they support

• URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-IF-THERE-IS-NOT-A-THUMBNAIL-PHOTO-IN-THE-POST 

Replace this with the web-address of a picture that you want to use if the individual post doesn't have a thumbnail  - perhaps your logo, or a blogger logo.

• App-ID and Facebook-Profile-ID

If you have got an App-ID associated with your blog, perhaps because you signed up to use Facebook commenting with it, then you may also want to add the following statements, just before  the "<!-- End Open Graph metadata -->"

<meta content='App-ID' property='fb:app_id'/>
<meta content='Facebook-Profile-ID' property='fb:admins'/>

Of course putting in your own values instead of the ones in red   (I'm assuming that if you knew enough to get an App-ID, then you will know how to find it, and also about the risks associated with linking your Facebook-profile-ID to your blog.)

3    Check it's complete:

Preview the template changes to make sure that they've worked, and then save them.

Troubleshooting

Testing the OG tags

Facebook have a tool that you can use to see what values the OG tags in your blog have.
It is found here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

Enter the URL of one of the posts from your blog and click Debug to see the OG tags which Facebook finds for it.

Descriptions

The Descriptions tag will only work if you have Search-descriptions on (Option > Search > Meta-tags > Enabled), and have entered a search description for each post using the post-editor.   I had hoped to be able to use post.snippet when this wasn't available, but have not been able to work out the correct syntax to do this.

Pictures

Facebook would like you to use an image that's at least 200x200 as your posts's thumbnail image or as the default image to use for posts that don't have one.

If the picture that you use is smaller than this, they do appear to use it.

However you will see the following message when you use a debugging tool to look at what tags Facebook is reading from your site:

og:image should be larger
Provided og:image is not big enough. Please use an image that's at least 200x200 px. Image 'http://3.bp.blogspot.com/XXX.png' will be used instead.

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Related Articles:

How to add Twitter-Cards to Blogger - these are the Twitter equivalent to Open Graph tags

Advantages and disadvantages of editing your Blogger template

Post.thumbnail:   a summary image for a post

How to edit your Blogger template

Linking your blog to the social networks